It's Not Violet!

[or: Porphyrophobia]


Molly Hooper absolutely adores the color purple. Even as a child, when every girl chose pink and every boy chose blue, she finds her desires flying to that rich, royal, almost hypnotizing shade that is, purple.

She's always tried her hardest to look for purple flowers when everyone else found their merry way amongst the red, the orange, the golden yellow. It made her seem quite eccentric, but she never did care. They didn't have enough money as a child to give her a choice of color with regards to her clothes and her school things and her bedroom (as a family, they shared a one-bedroom flat), but just because something was out of reach doesn't mean one cannot love it. Especially if one knows exactly what it is.

Such is the color purple to Molly Hooper.

She fears it. That color. How it has the power to bring her morale down and break her heart, as it had done when she was a schoolgirl staring at the gleaming purple ribbon of the soldier's medal in her textbook and glancing longingly at her classmate Renée's purple lunchbox.

And then one day, Sherlock Holmes bursts into the morgue doors, barely one month after her newly-acquired junior pathologist position at Bart's, wearing the sharpest suit she's ever seen over the most mesmerizing shade of purple she could have ever imagined. On her lunch break that day, she wondered if Sherlock Holmes really is as brilliant as he seemed.

Five years, millions of insults and a humiliating pile of rejected coffee invitations later, she knows that yes, Sherlock Holmes really is as brilliant as he seemed to be that first day. And with another rejection, another insult, this time in front of Mike and a man with blond hair and tired eyes, she is transformed back to the little girl who wanted nothing more than to have a purple blanket. Here she is, decades of life experience and a medical degree in her pocket, and still purple is as out of reach to her as it's always been.

It is as she has always feared but never known. She's always feared not the color itself, but what the color can be. No one could have ever warned her. If she could love a color so much, what would happen if she ever discovers what love really is? That is not a question you ask a child as she smiles gleefully at the purple crayon in the box.


Note: The author would like to thank mischief-with-sandra for the interesting prompt. Hope it's up to her, and the readers', standards.